Friday, October 7, 2011

Time is money? Not *your* time.

PBOT [Portland Bureau of Transportation] is running a transportation policy class in conjunction with the Planning School at PSU. PBOT is providing "scholarships" for various "community leaders" to take the class. I seem to have been tagged as a "community leader."

So the class starts at 6:20 PM on Thursdays, and class participants have been bombarded by PBOT staffers with requests that folks use public transit to attend the class.

I sent the following to Scott Cohen at PBOT regarding the class and transit to it:

"To get to this class from my residence near PCC Sylvania, about 6 miles from PSU, I need to leave my house at about 5:45 PM., walk 6 blocks and catch a Tri Met # 44 bus downtown at 6:03 P.M., according to the TriMet trip planner.

"To get home, I need to catch a # 44 Tri Met bus at Fifth and Harrison, at 8:54 PM, which drops me off 6 blocks from home, according to the TriMet trip planner. If the night bus is on time, I will get home about 9:35 PM. Basically a two hour, 12 mile trip to attend a two hour class.

"Tell me again about Portland having a viable public transit system. Tell me yet again about the CoP and PBOT policy to actively discourage POV usage in the downtown core, by making parking unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Tell me you even faintly understand how poorly the combined transit policies of PBOT, TriMet and Metro actually work in serving folks who travel."

Yikes. We share his pain, though. We found ourselves in the Portland State vicinity last week on blog business. We parked in a garage under an office building. When we came back to our car less than 90 minutes later, we paid $4.50 for the privilege of having left it there. Ugly.

Comments (17)

I stopped going downtown for shopping years ago for this very reason. Once, I lost track of time, and it wasn't until about 7pm that I was ready to catch a bus to get home. And lo and behold, it turned out that, basically, the buses stop running after 6, so I ended up waiting in the cold and the rain, with smokers and panhandlers all around, for about 40 minutes for a bus. And that was when the transit mall was configured such that, at the same bus stop, I had a choice of either the 19 or the 10, both of which were viable options for me. Now, with the transit mall configured differently, I could be waiting even longer. After that, I decided that transit didn't work for me, and I haven't ridden the bus downtown since. Driving downtown, of course, is equally frustrating and even more expensive. And driving to a Max station to pay to get a train is just too silly.

Community leaders who are volunteers do not have all this extra time whether by transportation or even by express bus to get there to be so constantly engaged by the city now using PSU projects/collaborations for even more busywork.

Seems like the meetings have escalated, another way to keep the people involved on the city's track.

Again, why this close connection with the city and PSU planning school? How much independence in thinking regarding planning is at this university?

Seems to me that per Portland standard-operating-procedure, when you want minimum attendance at policy meetings you make the idea of even going as unappealing or inconvenient as possible. At least they didn't ask you to ride a bicycle made of cob.

Here's what really sad: Taking the bus to PSU is actually quicker than driving, especially for a class that begins at 6:20 pm. On several occasions, I have driven in circles for 30 minutes (hey, at least I wasn't idling) only to say "F-ck it, I'm gonna park in this reserved spot." Never was ticketed, but I chalk that up to a combination of luck and PSU laziness.

By the way Jack - that $4.50 is what you pay for 90 minutes in the City operated parking garages in San Francisco. If nothing else, it shows how much the City and PSU are ripping off the public for parking..

Road Work

Miles run year to date: 80
At this date last year: 89
Total run in 2014: 401
In 2013: 257
In 2012: 129
In 2011: 113
In 2010: 125
In 2009: 67
In 2008: 28
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In 2006: 100
In 2005: 149
In 2004: 204
In 2003: 269